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9f 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
PRESENT CRISIS 



THE CHALLENGE 

OF THE 

PRESENT CRISIS 



HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 

Author of ''The Meaning of Prayer" ''The Manhood oj 
the Master," etc. 



ASSOCIATION PRESS 

124 East 28th Street, New York 

1917 



ir\ 






Copyright, 1917, by 

The International Committee of 

Young Men's Christian Associations 



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printed m the united states of America 

OCT 10 1917 
©C;.A473949 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

I did not intend to write an essay on 
the War, and I am glad to see that I 
have avoided doing so. Many informing 
treatises are throwing Hght on every as- 
pect of the great struggle, and it is not 
likely that there will be lack of more. 
But when all the special treatises have 
had their say, an inner problem still re- 
mains unsolved. In what mood shall a 
Christian, or for that matter an idealist of 
any kind, face the catastrophe? With 
what considerations and insights can he 
support his faith and hope.^ And how 
can he harmonize his ideals with his ne- 
cessities of action in a time of war.^ The 
morale of our people critically depends 
upon their answer to such questions. 

If one attempts to write upon the War 
with these needs in mind, the result can- 
not be an impersonal treatise. One must 
say out what his own thought has done 
in adjusting life to the strange and hor- 



FOREWORD 

rible events of these days; he nwist plead 
for the attitudes that seem essential to 
the saving of man's spiritual treasures. 
This little book, therefore, is a message, 
not an essay, and while the pronoun of 
the first person is absent, the background 
of the argument is none the less the 
struggle of the writer to see his way and 
keep his soul alive in this terrific genera- 
tion. If taken, then, for what it was in- 
tended, it may be worth the reading to 
some other who is finding this a difficult 
time in which to think, believe, and live. 
At least, in this hope, it has been written. 

Harry Emerson FokSDick. 

September 1, 1917. 



Tl 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
PRESENT CRISIS 



The first question to be answered by 
any individual or by any social group, 
The real handle facing a hazardous sit- 
to a difficult uation, is whether the 

situation • • • x u x. 

crisis is to be met as a 

challenge to strength or as an occasion 
for despair. Henry Fawcett, a young 
Englishman, hunting with his father, 
suffered an accident staggering enough to 
break the nerve of ordinary men: his 
father shot at a partridge, hit his son's 
eyes, and entirely blinded them. Writing 
about the matter afterward, young Faw- 
cett said, "I made up my mind inside of 
ten minutes after the accident to stick 
to my main purpose as far as in me lay. " 
He kept his word^worked his way 

if 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

through Cambridge University, was made 
Professor of PoHtical Economy there, was 
elevated to be Postmaster-General of 
England, and gave to the British people 
a generation ago the Parcel Post that we 
in America have just achieved for our- 
selves. He took hold of his situation by 
its real handle; he met it as a challenge 
to his strength and not as an excuse for 
disheartenment. 

Even a little observation of popular 
reactions to the Great War reveals many 
men inwardly looking at the catastrophe 
in unrelieved dismay. It means to them 
despair, not challenge. One of the most 
important battles of this generation is 
being fought behind closed doors, where 
men are making up their minds whether 
this war is to leave them social pessimists 
or not. Wiile many voices, therefore, are 
speaking of the signijBcance of the War for 
political, diplomatic, financial, and mili- 
tary interests, something more ought to 
be said about the meaning of the War to 
our personal attitude and faith. All con- 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

structive agencies, after the war is over, 
will depend for their success upon the 
vision and energy of those who have not 
been driven by the present catastrophe 
into cynicism. That many are becoming 
cynical, are growing dubious of social 
possibilities, are surrendering to practical 
skepticism the faith which they never 
would have surrendered to speculative 
doubt, is clear to anyone who talks much 
with men. Materialism as a theory never 
would have convinced them. But the 
horrors of Verdun, the mutilated bodies 
of Belgian boys, the bleaching bones of 
countless children left by the Russian 
retreat along the military roads of Poland, 
and, after sixty generations of Christian 
opportunity, some five million wounded 
men in the hospitals of Europe — how 
shall we keep heart in the face of this? 

One natural consequence of such a 
reaction to the War is a lavish accusation 
of failure against the ideal agencies on 
which men had counted to improve the 
world. As in nervous prostration a man 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

becomes most fretful against those whom 
in normal health he loves best, so, many 
people, in the collapse of nerve which the 
War has caused, bring the accusation of 
futility against the best loved of their 
faiths. What most we had relied upon, 
seeing that it has not saved us from the 
very evil its purpose w as to cure, we now 
in exasperated disillusionment throw upon 
the scrap-heap. Christianity is a failure 
— ^how often has the charge been spoken 
and how much of tener has the doubt been 
thought! 

An initial mistrust as to the wisdom of 
this attitude is suggested by the simple 
fact that if one is to call Christianity a 
failure because it has not forestalled this 
war, logically he must box the compass 
before he is through and call failures all 
those agencies on which we might have 
counted to prevent the catastrophe. If 
for this reason Christianity is a failure, so 
too is education. War may be wicked 
from the standpoint of religion, but just 
as truly is it foolish from the standpoint 

V 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

of intelligence, and the universities of 
Europe and America have been estab- 
lished long enough to have taught men 
before this the futility of war. If Chris- 
tianity is a failure because it has not 
prevented the present disaster, so too is. 
commerce. It promised to bind the dis- 
severed races in an economic unity so 
close that what happened to one would 
happen to all, and so to make the race 
one family. On that interdependence 
Norman Angell had taught us to rely for 
the increasing unprofitableness and, as 
some of us dared hope, the increasing 
improbability of war. But now the eco- 
nomic bonds are torn asunder; they have 
proved to be causes of strife, not barriers 
against it. If anything is a failure, surely 
that social idealism is, on which we have 
been priding ourselves these recent dec- 
ades past. Only a small proportion of 
those who read these words are likely to 
be Socialists in a technical sense, and yet 
all of us had counted on the international 
Socialist brotherhood, uniting so many 
5 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

million workmen of so many nations in a 
league pledged explicitly and absolutely 
against war. Great confidence for the 
future was begotten when in Berlin's pub- 
lic square 100,000 Socialists at the time 
of the Agadir incident lifted their hands 
unanimously against war with France. 
And yet, in spite of brave attempts, the 
voice of the Socialists against this cata- 
clysm has been pitiably weak. Christian- 
ity a failure.^ Then surely international 
law is. The international conventions, 
guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, 
had expended on them the best brains 
that statesmanship could supply, but 
they are scraps of paper now. The leagues 
and covenants to make the world a more 
fraternal place, although they are the 
finest work of our best international 
lawyers, have been torn to tatters by 
military necessity. If anything has failed, 
international law has. 

Does any sane man think, however, 
that it is possible to be content with such 
a sweeping charge of failure against our 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

ideal agencies? Are they hopelessly to 
be thrown into the discard? A man who 
has fallen into a pit might as well saw off 
his own legs in despite because they did 
not prevent him from falling in. On 
second thought, he will do well to keep 
those legs; they are his only hope of 
ever climbing out again. His attitude 
toward them is sadly incomplete if he 
sits at the pit's bottom, blaspheming the 
feet that he should have walked straight 
with. And in the reconstructive age that 
shall succeed the war, mankind must keep 
and confidently rely upon those ideal 
agencies which, with too facile tongues, 
some folk call failures. Education, fra- 
ternalized commerce, social idealism, in- 
ternational law, and Christianity — these 
are not ready for the discard. They are 
humanity's great hope. This war is not 
so much an occasion for despair concern- 
ing them as it is a challenge to a better 
understanding and a finer use of them. 



\ 



THE CHALLENGE OF 
II 

If a man, however, with any satisfac- 
tion and confidence, is thus to face the 
Reasons for Pi^esent crisis m terms of 
accepting the challenge, he must have 

present crisis something more than a 
as a challenge , ^ . ''^. ^ . 

determination so to face 

it. Only a frivolous mind can easily be 
optimistic at a time like this. One who 
today feels no strain upon his faith has not 
taken his faith seriously enough to at- 
tempt the direct application of it to the 
actual facts of the war. Let him take his 
former social hopes into the trenches, the 
hospitals, the desolated homes of Europe, 
let him face his old faiths with the elemen- 
tal human factors that made this war 
possible and that will make the prevention 
of its repetition difficult, and he will crave 
some solid reasons for continued hope, 
some intelligible justification for accept- 
ing the crisis not with dismay, but as a 
challenge to his courage and devotion. 
One intelligible reason for the attitude 
8 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

which we recommend is to be found in the 
very factors that make this the most ap- 
palHng war in history. What conditions 
necessarily precede the most distressing 
conflicts that mankind can know? Are 
they not always conditions of intimate 
relationship? For this reason the worst 
of all fights is a family fight. One can- 
not have a heart-breaking quarrel with a 
total stranger; there are not points of 
contact enough. But one can have a 
dour time in his own family. The very 
relationships that offer most gracious op- 
portunities for satisfaction, peace, and 
self-development are the same relation- 
ships that offer the most exasperating 
chance for misunderstanding, discord, 
and collision. Now, the basic reason 
for this war's appalling extent and ter- 
rific character is that it is waged in 
a world of increasingly intimate rela- 
tionships. The ends of the earth have 
been crowded together as man has con- 
quered distance with his swift inventions. 
The points of contact between nations 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

and races have been indefinitely multi- 
plied. More than once the telegraph sta- 
tions around the world have been aligned 
for a message that made the swift circuit 
of the globe. Such a message left Oyster 
Bay one night when Mr. Roosevelt was 
President. It was a minute later when it 
went through Denver and a minute later 
still when it dived out through the Golden 
Gate. Then it slid past Manila, sang 
through the Indian Ocean, leaped over the 
boundary of Asia into Europe, jumped 
across England, came up from its long 
bath in the Atlantic on the bleak shores of 
Newfoundland, and set the telegraph re- 
ceiver ticking almost before the trans- 
mitter had ceased — around the world in 
nine minutes! A fellowship of life so 
close and intimate has followed in the 
wake of these new means of communica- 
tion that we need not be surprised to learn 
that when war was declared in Europe 
food prices in Siam went up 100 per cent. 
The bullets that fly at the front today 
fly further than bullets ever went before. 
10 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

They strike not only the men and boys in 
the trenches and the women and children 
at home. They strike the business man 
in Shanghai and the family with a son of 
military age in San Francisco ; their whirr 
calls brown and black men from the an- 
tipodes and is answered by cannon on the 
warships of a nation that until a genera- 
tion ago represented the acme of racial 
exclusiveness. 

Plainly a world of such unprecedented 
intimacies offers a double chance to its 
inhabitants. On the one side lies the 
finest opportunity for racial solidarity 
and international brotherhood that man- 
kind has ever known; on the other the 
most abysmal possibilities of friction, 
collision, and terrific war. Did we really 
think that mankind was so ideal that 
dealing with this new situation of multi- 
plied relationships, difiicult to handle, 
full alike of blessing and of curse, it could 
get all the sweet and none of the bitter? 
The passions that breed war are deep in 
the human heart; the traditions that sup- 
W 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

port war are venerable. How could man 
learn what war would mean in this new 
world-neighborhood without trying it? 
How could he handle so new and intricate 
a situation and not mishandle it? Yet 
the very conditions that make the con- 
sequence of his mishandling so terrible 
are the same conditions on which are 
founded our hopes of racial unity and 
world-wide brotherhood. Say, as we 
must, that this war in its extent and horror 
surpasses all its predecessors, yet who 
would give up the chances of growing 
internationalism and an ultimate federa- 
tion of the world that lie in the very in- 
timacies which make the widespread hor- 
ror possible? The whole course of man- 
kind's increasing interdependence indi- 
cates that in this war we are paying the 
heavy price for the upward climb toward 
solidarity. We are fighting the war on 
the way up, not on the way down. Give 
man time and he yet will learn to handle 
the new relationships for fraternity and 
not for war. 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

Our own American slates passed llirough 
a colonial period when the points of con- 
tact increased beyond \]\(t flower of wis- 
dom and good will to handlf^ them. The 
friction of mutual j(talousi(;s, impossif>Ie 
between strangers, diffir;ijlt to avoid Ijc- 
tween neigh})ors, issur^d in tariff wars and 
even in the invasion of armed bands. At 
last, within memory of many living, one 
of the great wars of history was fought 
before the colliding interests between the 
states were accommodate^] irj a federation 
that no misunderstanding ever again will 
break. Such is the course of social evohj- 
tion. Tljose quarrels of the states were 
met on the way up toward unity. They 
grew out of tljr- friction of irjr:r(;asing 
intimacy. Weak men wen* dismayc^d at 
them; courageous men saw the opportuni- 
ties in tljc very relationships that were 
being al^used. Today tljr* same prr^bh-iri 
on a world-wide scale invites the faith 
and challenges the hope of rn(*n. It says: 
Look ihroufjh the t(;rror of tlje [present 
}jour at th(' basic: elements tljat rrjakr* it 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

possible for seven-eighths of mankind to 
be engaged in the same war. For in the 
very interdependence of all races and 
nations lies the possibility of realizing 
Joseph Cook's dream: '*The nineteenth 
century made the world into a neighbor- 
hood; the twentieth century will make 
it into a brotherhood. " 

Another reason for accepting this pres- 
ent crisis in terms of challenge rather 
than dismay lies in the fact that this is 
the first war in history that has made men 
widely say that Christianity is a failure. 
Christendom has not hitherto so per- 
ceived the incongruity between war and 
the Christian Gospel as to feel that the 
continuance of war was a reflection on 
Christianity's effectiveness. Some of the 
early Fathers, to be sure, Tertullian, 
Cyprian, Lactantius, denounced war as 
unchristian, but from the time of Con- 
stantine the Church and war congenially 
have lived together. Many of war's 
worst horrors were alleviated, some 
of its worst excesses curbed, and the 
1^ 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

Church's sanctuaries and truces became 
oases in the midst of hostihty. Al- 
ways there was a standing disagreement, 
however latent, between Christ and or- 
ganized slaughter. But one looks in vain 
for any such widespread consciousness as 
we face today that the persistence of war 
is a staggering blow to the claims of 
Christianity. Said Athanasius, "It is 
not permitted to kill; but in war to slay 
the enemy is both legitimate and worthy 
of all praise." Said Augustine, "What is 
the evil in war? Is it that men who are 
to die anyway die that the victors may 
live in peace? To complain of this is the 
part of the timid, not the religious." 
Said Luther, "Permanent peace is a 
dream and not even a beautiful one. 
But war is an essential element of 
God's scheme for the world." The 
popes sent armies out to battle and 
blessed their banners for the fighting. 
Henry VIII's bishops, as Shakespeare 
rightly pictures them, urged the king to 
war. And when unbelievers were in 
15 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

question some Peter the Hermit stormed 
Europe with urgent calls to slaughter, 
''Deus vulV — God wills it. Nor can any- 
one who listens today fail to hear echoes 
of this historic attitude that accepted 
war, unconscious of any essential incom- 
patibility between the spirit of Christ and 
the spirit of a battlefield. 

Christianity and war lived in peace to- 
gether as did Christianity and slavery. 
For generations none perceived dishar- 
mony between these two. If some now 
call the Gospel a failure because war per- 
sists, what would they have said if, with 
awakened conscience in the matter, they 
had lived while Christianity and slavery 
walked arm in arm down the centuries? 
John Newton, who wrote, "How sweet 
the name of Jesus sounds in a believer's 
ear!" tells us of blissful seasons of prayer 
to Christ, while on slaving expeditions 
along the African coast. Cotton Mather, 
our own Puritan prophet, thanked God 
with full heart for the arrival of a cargo 
of slaves and molasses, overdue from the 
16 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

West Indies, but at last come safely in at 
Boston port. Nothing in history seems 
to us more essentially unchristian than 
the slave raids in Africa, the merciless 
conditions of transportation, and the in- 
humanities of the slave's life as slavery 
spread. Consider a system one of whose 
characteristic expressions could be an 
advertisement like this, published in our 
own country in 1825: 

"Twenty dollars reward, — ran away 
from the subscriber, on the 14th instant, 
a negro girl named Molly. She is 16 or 
17 years of age, slim made, lately brand- 
ed on her left cheek, thus, 'R,' and a 
piece is taken off her left ear on the same 
side; the same letter is branded on the 
inside of both her legs. 

Abner Ross, 
Fairfield District, S. C." 



And then consider that one of the last 
defenses of that system was written by a 
Christian bishop. 

17 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

But the day came when men began to 
cry: "Christianity is a failure, it has not 
stopped slavery." The incongruity be- 
tween the Gospel of God's Fatherhood on 
the one side and holding a fellow-being 
in serfdom on the other, had at last be- 
come evident. That was one of the cli- 
mactic days in history. Aristotle tells us 
that a few people in his time thought that 
slavery was unethical. Such occasional 
insight doubtless had persisted through 
centuries, a subterranean stream rising in 
sporadic fountains, some of which we 
know. But at last the stream emerged fully 
into the light. Men saw, with regard to 
slavery, the clear implications of the Gos- 
pel; they perceived that Christianity and 
slavery could not perpetually live to- 
gether in the same world. The issue was 
drawn: Christianity would be a failure 
if it did not stop slavery. And from the 
day that the issue was drawn, the result 
was assured. It was not Christianity 
that failed; it was slavery. 

When, therefore, men cry today that 
18 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

Christianity is a failure because it has not 
stopped war, a man of faith may well 
thank God and take courage. 

This, too, is a climactic day in his- 
tory. For so long time the Gospel and 
war have lived together in ignoble amity ! 
If at last the disharmony between the 
spirit of Jesus and the spirit of war is 
becoming evident, then a great hope has 
dawned on the race. Only a little while 
ago many were telling us that Christian- 
ity had nothing to do with social ques- 
tions, that it was a gospel of salvation for 
the individual out of the wreckage of a 
ruined world. They urged ministers to 
"stick to the Gospel" in its application to 
the separate souls of men and to keep a 
quiet tongue about the wider applications 
of Christ's truth. And now we are told 
that Christianity has failed because it has 
not stopped war ! It is confessed then, that 
Christianity does have something to do 
with social questions, that it will be 
judged and judged rightly not alone by 
what it does for individuals, but by what 
19 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

it makes of the world in which individuals 
must live. As for war, the same charge 
confesses that the issue is drawn between 
that and the Gospel. Many opinions as 
to ways and means for bringing perma- 
nent security will be entertained, but 
underneath diversity of method, the main 
issue is clear: Christianity will indeed 
have failed, if it does not stop war. 

If, then, the issue is drawn, this is no 
time for despair. The situation is a 
stirring challenge to our strength and our 
devotion. Impossible to conquer? Rather, 
as an old reformer cried, ''The only differ- 
ence between the difficult and the impossi- 
ble is that the impossible takes a little 
longer time." If mankind had no other 
outlook than an indefinite recurrence of 
wars like this, hope for a worthy future 
for the race would have to be surrendered; 
stoical fortitude would be our best re- 
course. But no such disheartened coun- 
sel need content us. The conclusion of 
this world-drama, now at its climax, 
need no more see the triumph of war than 
20 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

our fathers' generation saw the triumph 
of slavery. If we will, we may have 
another victory for Christian ideals. 

A further reason for accepting the 
present crisis as a challenge lies in the 
assurance that comes from the perspec- 
tive of history. The tremendous events 
through which we now are living tend 
to preoccupy all our thoughts. We are 
obsessed by the immediate, because the 
immediate is so absorbingly terrific. But 
it is not treachery to the importance of 
the present hour to retreat from it far 
enough to see it in the perspective of the 
centuries. We do not lose faith now when 
we read of the Peloponnesian War that 
ruined Athens. But contemporaries did. 
Euripides' skepticism had> for its back- 
ground that appalling conflict which 
brought the pride of his Achaia to the 
dust. How modern is his ancient cry! 

"When faith overfloweth my mind, God's provi- 
dence all embracing 
Banisheth griefs; but when Doubt whispereth, 
Ah, but to know! 

21 



W 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

No clue through the tangle I find, of fate and 
of life for my tracing." 

We do not lose faith now when we 
read of the old barbarian invasions that 
devastated Europe, although they over- 
threw the civilization on which man's 
choicest hopes seemed to depend. But 
multitudes of contemporaries did, and 
Augustine's '' City of God" is the splendid 
attempt of a man who would not sur- 
render hope to steady his fellows in the 
time of their dismay. The man who 
wrote it, aged and unconquered, died 
while the victorious barbarians were 
hammering at his city's gates. We do 
not lose faith now when over against the 
French Revolution's fair beginning, prom- 
ising liberty, fraternity, equality, we note 
its dismal end — the tumbrils rumbling 
through the city's streets and the falling 
guillotines. But contemporaries had a 
bitter struggle to keep heart and Words- 
worth in the dismay of the time retreated 
to the woods and later described his pain- 
ful disillusionment: 

22 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

"I lost 
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, 
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, 
Yielded up moral questions in despair." 

How often have such earthquakes, like 
the Great War now, thrown the saints 
upon their faces in dismay! Yet in the 
retrospect of history, Peloponnesian wars, 
barbarian invasions, French revolutions 
take their proper and significant place. 
They do not now appear as hopeless 
blockades to human progress. Rather 
they emerge like rocks around which 
the advancing stream of the human 
river swirled for a while and made its 
progress more evident by the commotion. 
And in our better hours we know that 
this present catastrophe so will take its 
place in history. It is not the end of all 
things, the finale of our hopes. The 
unique thing about our generation is not 
the War. War has always been here. In 
over 3,000 years of written history since 
1496 B. C. there have been hardly more 
than 227 years of peace. The unique 
23 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

thing about our generation is the way 
the very people who decide for war, as 
President AYilson did, are thinking about 
it. Their obvious abhorrence of war, their 
increasingly clear insight that whatever 
may be the necessities of immediate ac- 
tion, war, regarded from the standpoint 
of the ideal, is the last word in idiocy and 
infamy as a w^ay of settling international 
diflSculties in the twentieth century — 
this is more distinctive of our time and 
country than war itself is. And when a 
man senses this, he throws aside the 
despair that in weaker hours confuses him 
and goes out to do his "bit" for that 
Divine Purpose in the world, which this 
war may impede, but which it cannot 
stop. He determines to play his part, 
that this war may impede the Divine 
Purpose as little as possible and that out 
of it may come indeed a world made 
"safe for democracy." Behind this atti- 
tude he feels the confirmation of history. 
Ahead of it he sees the promise of hope. 



24 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

III 

If the reader's assent has at all been 
gained by the reasons wliicli we have 
An ap' noted for aecepting the world's 

preclation crisis as a challenge and not 

of force • / 1 • 

as an oeeasion for desi)air, 

the natural progress of our thought leads 
us to consider th(i practical directions 
which that challenge takes. To lis in 
America the War is now no longer a mere 
theory to he discussed; it is upon us as a 
call to action, a stupendous fact whose 
range and depth of influence no man can 
measure. \\ hether or not we sliould our- 
selves have voted for America's participa- 
tion in the struggle, the War is ours now, 
and its cli alien ge U) our Christianity is 
unescapable. To what does it summon 
us? 

As Christians we are summoned, for 
one thing, amid all the obsessing influ- 
ences of war, to keep a clear insight into 
the limitations of force as an agency in 
human life. This does not mean that 
25 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

force can be dispensed with. Indeed, 
since the whole temper of our thought is 
so anti-mihtaristic, we may well take 
special pains to do justice to force, to 
grant it all the value that its usefulness 
deserves. Those who put force on one 
side and love upon the other, as though 
there were between them an unavoidable 
antipathy, are creating one of those false 
dilemmas which are a common stumbling- 
block to useful thinking. Force and love 
are not necessarily antithetical. Doubt- 
less it is the absolute ideal that children 
should be reared by moral suasion only, 
without compulsion. But because most 
of us were not absolutely ideal children, 
we are thankful that we were not reared 
on an absolutely ideal schedule. We are 
glad that some things not otherwise ob- 
tainable in us were helped by the judicious 
application of force in the hands of love. 
Love in its high reaches is not a soft and 
cooing thing — it is life's most searching 
and tremendous power, and neither in 
the family nor in the commonwealth 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

ought it so to delight in the comfort of 
tenderness that it refuses the discipUne 
of force. 

The love of Jesus is commonly appealed 
to by those who would altogether dis- 
pense with force. One has only to read 
the many conflicting interpretations of 
Jesus' sayings in their application to the 
questions which this war presents, to see 
how difficult, if not quite impossible it is, 
to build with confidence any solution of 
our special problems on a literal pressing 
of the texts. The Master never faced in 
his own experience, never directly con- 
sidered in his teaching a national prob- 
lem such as Belgium met when the Prus- 
sians crossed the border. To be sure he 
fraternized with centurions, taking them 
for granted as unreprovingly as in his 
parables he took slavery for granted, but 
no cause can be made out for or against 
either slavery or war from this natural 
attitude of his. The fact is that Jesus did 
not directly face our modern questions 
about war; they were not his problem, and 
27 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

to press a legalistic interpretation of 
special texts, as though they were, is a 
misuse of the gospels. 

It is clear, however, that that boundless 
love of hi^, which was the center of his 
life, was no mild and dovelike thing. It 
had terrific aspects. The love of Jesus 
looked on Lazarus, lying untended at 
Dives' gate, and then the love of Jesus 
looked on Dives, and God have mercy on 
him after that ! The love of Jesus looked on 
pious Israelites coming up to the Father's 
temple to pay their tithes and make their 
offerings of sacrifice, and then the love of 
Jesus looked upon the hucksters who rang 
this piety upon their counters for their 
private gain; and the love of Jesus took a 
whip of cords and drove them out. Jesus 
pictures the ideal of life ilnder the figure 
of a shepherd, and the tender aspects of 
the shepherd's ministry so captivate our 
imagination that we would leave the pic- 
ture with no shadows in it. Not so our 
Lord. He is under no such soft illusions 
about life. He follows through his figure 
28 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

till the thief comes, that he "may steal 
and kill and destroy"; he adds the wolf 
as well, who if he can "snatcheth them 
and scattereth them"; and then the 
shepherd proves his quality — ^while the 
hireling flees — ^by setting to in desperate 
encounter to protect his sheep. Jesus 
knew that a true shepherd could not al- 
ways be a gentle man; at times the call 
must come for force. The love of Jesus, 
as we often are reminded, said, "Bless 
them that curse you, pray for them that 
despitefully use you"; and that same love 
of Jesus, looking on the violaters of the 
poor, also said, "Ye serpents! Ye off- 
spring of vipers! How shall ye escape 
the judgment of hell?" Love like his 
does not always speak gently and act 
gently; love never can speak and act 
gently with effectiveness unless it has 
behind it capacious possibilities of moral 
indignation. Indeed so stern an aspect 
did the love of Jesus have that the 
greater problem which the serious in- 
terpreter must face and which pacifist 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

writers commonly forget, is not to har- 
monize the Master's love with so tem- 
poral a thing as the use of force for 
moral ends, but to harmonize it with 
so prodigious a conception as the word 
hell — familiar on his lips — even in its 
most merciful interpretation must con- 
note. ''These mine enemies that would 
not that I should reign over them, bring 
them hither and slay them before me" — 
no soft and comfortable soul, afraid of 
force, put words like that into his picture 
of the Eternal. Just as in the Master's 
love there are heights of tenderness and 
horizons of compassion where even our 
imaginations cannot reach, so, in the 
presence of obdurate iniquity, depths of 
sternness are there that make us quail. 
We have been too soft in our thought of 
him; we have remembered the 6th chapter 
of Matthew's gospel and have forgotten 
the 23rd; and some of the most egregious 
misinterpretations of him ever written 
have but lately come from extreme paci- 
ts, identifying love with gentleness. 
30 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

While, therefore, none can be dogmati- 
cally sure what Jesus would say about our 
duty in this present war — although we 
can be sure that Jesus would hate war 
and all that makes it possible — one does 
not see how a soul who spoke as Jesus 
spoke could forbid as intrinsically wrong 
the use of force for moral ends. And if, 
in answer the familiar text is pleaded, 
** Resist not evil," surely both the con- 
text and the whole temper of the Master's 
life make clear that the meaning there is 
not passive acquiescence in inic^uity, but 
rather that magnanimity of spirit which 
Paul summed up in his parallel word: 
"Recompense to no man evil for evil." 
For force in Jesus' thought must always 
be wielded with a heart of love behind and 
a purpose of good will ahead. 

Those who would dispense with force, 
who at a stroke would lift all opposition 
to evil from the physical to the moral 
plane, and fight iniquity w ith reason and 
love alone, do not estimate aright what 
sin can do to human life. They have an 
31 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

unsupported confidence that no heart ever 
grows so callous in iniquity that it is un- 
responsive to the appeal of tenderness. 
Such folk should go to court some day 
when the little children and the fathers 
who have beaten them are brought in. 
If anything in heaven above or on the 
earth beneath can love and forgive be- 
yond limit it is a little child. And these 
children have so forgiven and so loved 
again the brutal men whose rage has been 
vented on their defenseless bodies. Yet 
forgiven repeatedly by these little ones, 
beset by the appeals of their own chil- 
dren's unconquerable love for them, these 
men have gone on beating the scarred 
bodies of their own offspring with ob- 
durate cruelty. Sin can work that result 
and does work it in human hearts. This 
is the deep damnation of sin — that it 
makes men's spirits callous until the 
nerves are paralyzed that once thrilled to 
the touch of tenderness and the appeal of 
reason. The state's force cannot save 
these men from their brutality — only 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

love can do that — but it can stop the 
beating of the children. What do we 
really think Jesus would have said about 
it — Jesus who, facing something like it, 
said it were better for a man, with a 
mill-stone round his neck, to be flung 
into the sea, than to offend one of these 
little ones? 

It is true that the advance of society 
is marked by the progressive substitution 
of moral suasion for physical force: in 
wedlock, where men once captured wives 
and held them by brute strength, but 
now woo them instead; in parenthood, 
where a father's power of death over 
a child was once constraining and where 
now force is a last resort; in education, 
where no longer is the birch the tree 
of knowledge; in penology, where phys- 
ical compulsion gives way before more 
generous treatment of the criminal — 
everywhere the advance of social life 
involves the gradual displacement of 
brutal constraint by reasonable persua- 
sion. But this advance of human- 
83 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

ity will not bring us utterly past the need 
of force until it has eliminated more of 
sin than as yet has gon^ out of us. Any 
day on any street any man of us may face 
an exigency where sin is expressing itself 
in forms that far have overpassed the 
power of reason and gentleness immedi- 
ately to handle. We must use force. 
The wolf has come and we must be 
shepherds and not hirelings. 

It sometimes is maintained that even 
in international relations no emergency 
ever arises which a peaceful good will 
cannot meet. Writes an enthusiastic 
pacifist, "Suppose half of Belgium's sons 
who were killed in battle had died in- 
stead as unarmed martyrs resisting Ger- 
man progress, but not to the point of 
bloodshed — could even the Prussian host 
have advanced?" To which the answer 
seems suflBciently obvious : of course they 
could have advanced, just as they swept 
through unresisting and now enslaved, 
Luxemburg; advanced, if there were any 
determined opposition, as the old Romans 
34 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

slaughtered the unresisting Jews on Sab- 
bath days when the Jews died rather than 
fight. One admires those ancient He- 
brews, but it is their loyalty to principle 
that he admires and not their intelligence. 
No more fallacious reading of history is 
possi})le than that which represents the 
peaceful peoples as safe from aggression. 
The fact is that there never yet has been 
an agricultural civilization that grew rich 
in prosperity and weak in power that did 
not become victim to some predacious 
military nation. The gradual substitu- 
tion of moral for physical force in inter- 
national relations is as certain as human 
progress, for there can be no assured hu- 
man progress without it, but mankind is 
not yet so free from elemental sin that 
any nation can count on spiritual sweet- 
ness as a safeguard against rampant greed. 
Even Jesus did not })less the peaceful; he 
blessed the j^eace-makers; and peace- 
making in any human relationship may 
any day involve resort to force. 

When such exigencies come, no man 

35 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

can be sure how far the use of force may 
have to go. To say that we may use 
force up to the point of kiUing and not 
beyond is in practice often an impossible 
distinction. It is here that the crucial 
difficulty and horror of the Christian 
arise, alike in personal experiences where 
he has taken life to protect another and 
in the frank and brutal slaughter of a 
war. Only a few question the rectitude 
of parental compulsion or the wisdom of 
having our police. The difficulty comes 
when the use of force involves killing. 
Personality is for Christians the one ab- 
solute value in the world, and to push the 
use of force to the point where it kills 
seems blatant denial of all that Christians 
say about the worth of persons. To be- 
lieve that a man is a son of God and your 
brother and yet to kill him — in what fla- 
grant contradiction do those two things 
stand ! 

Facing this issue some Christians, 
notably the Quakers, have framed their 
answer in uncompromising idealism. I 
36 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

will not kill, says such a Christian. Under 
no circumstances, even when my own 
existence is at stake, or a woman's honor 
or a child's life is concerned, or moral 
principles are involved that I confess to 
be of essential value to mankind, will I 
ever kill. In personal relations I will 
never so oppose evil as to run any risk of 
ending the physical existence of anybody, 
and as for war, I will have no part in it. 
The nation may jail me, my friends de- 
sert me, and public opinion call me trai- 
tor, but I will not fight. The business of 
war is killing men, and to that business I 
will not consent, in it I will have no share. 
The enemy may be ruthless beyond reach 
of the immediate persuasions of reason 
and good will; he may burn our cities, 
rape our women, mutilate our children — 
but I will not kill. Personality is sacred 
and my hand shall never violate it. 

Thus some Christians have spoken and 
no one who rightly measures the con- 
trast between the Cross of Christ and 
screwing a bayonet into a fellow-man will 
87 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

lightly scorn their spirit. But this is not 
the only way in which a Christian may 
speak. I, too, count personality su- 
premely sacred — so another Christian 
may say — ^but personality and physical 
existence are not identical They are 
not identical in myself. My personality 
is God's most sacred trust to me; it is the 
thing I am, my soul, and to gain the 
whole world and lose that were a poor 
bargain; but any day I must be ready to 
surrender my physical existence for an- 
other's welfare and for the ideals that 
make us men. What is true of me is true 
of others. Their personality is one thing; 
their physical existence is another. Any 
day the exigency may arise where, with 
no depreciation whatsoever of my esti- 
mate of personality's absolute, unrivaled 
worth, I may, for a woman's safety or a 
child's life, have to strip some man's 
physical existence from him, if I can, and 
trust God that in the world unseen his 
abiding personality may be recovered 
from his sin. Nothing is worth more than 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

personality, but many things are worth 
more than physical existence, whether 
mine or another's, and when the race for- 
gets that, the days of moral grandeur are 
ended and the doom of heroism come. 
Therefore, when other measures fail, I 
shall not hesitate to throw my life, at any 
risk to my body or to his, against one 
who assails what should be inviolate, nor 
shall I ever call the Belgians iniquitous 
because they risked their own physical 
existence and the invaders' in a magni- 
ficent endeavor, in the face of perfidy, to 
keep their word. Bayonets do not reach 
as far as personality; they reach only 
physical existence, and the problem of 
personality passes far beyond an earthly 
battlefield. So a man may speak and 
be a Christian. 

If such a willingness upon a Christian's 
part to risk his own and others' lives in 
physical encounter, when rampant evil 
resists other cure, seems a compromise 
with his ideals, it is only such a compro- 
mise as is involved in all endeavor to live 
39 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

for ideals amid unidcal conditions. War 
is unchristian, l)ut so is our economic 
system with its terrific inec^uities. Our 
economic competition is the war perpetual 
that runs through all the days of so-called 
peace and is one of the major causes of 
that more o1)vi()us war that uses sword 
and shrapnel. No one who deeply sees 
the evils that our fight for wealth brings 
on man, with an incidence more terrible 
than war because it is so continuous and 
unrelieved, can call it Christian. War 
brutalizes men? So does our economic 
system, ruining multitudes with hours of 
labor that no life can endure, under con- 
ditions that no character can sustain. 
War kills men? So does our economic 
system, resisting the expense of safer con- 
ditions of labor, blowing men up need- 
lessly in mines, pulverizing them in un- 
guarded machinery, poisoning them every 
day with deadly gases, and on our Ameri- 
can railroads running up a death-rate that 
no necessity ever can excuse. War ruins 
childhood? So does our economic system, 
40 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

using up children like grist in our mills, 
and withstanding by every means that 
money can buy and legal talent can sug- 
gest all movements for their relief. There 
are }jra\'e and unselfish aspects U) our 
commercial life as there are to war, and 
noble men are engaged in both, but no 
one who knows the under side of our 
fight for rtioYKty can help knowing the 
horror of il. 'i'here is hardly a kind of 
agony on a modem battlefield that has 
not its counterpart somewhere in our 
economic struggle. 

Shall a man say, then, that because 
the economic system Is unchristian he 
will have none of it? He could say that 
if he were in earnest about absolutf.dy 
uncompromised ideals. He could sell hLs 
stocks and bonds, give up hLs position, 
refusfi to buy and sfill, and as a non- 
resistant pacifist willingly suffers any loss 
rather than share directly or indirectly 
in a war, so he could go out alone to live 
as a monk, free from the entangle- 
ments of an unchristian business world. 
41 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

But that man would be shouldering 
off on others the necessity of dealmg 
with life's stern, forbidding problems 
and would be retreating into a spirit- 
ual vacuum to nurse his absolute ideals. 
Such an attitude is rank individualism 
and is obviously unethical. No more can 
we play the recluse in the face of such a 
war as this, content to say that fighting is 
unchristian and that we will have none of 
it. The answer to such an attitude need 
involve no defense of war. From the 
standpoint of every high ideal, war is un- 
christian — essentially, hideously unchris- 
tian. After a look at Europe, let no man 
ever again speak of a Christian war! The 
Christian's definite and unrelenting hos- 
tility to that international paganism from 
which war inevitably comes, we shall deal 
with later. But if, in the present stage of 
human society, moral values are at stake 
which ruthless violence attacks, we cannot 
remain outside the critical problem thus 
thrust upon us as though we lived in 
another and a better world. We must 
42 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

help to meet the crisis, with all its wretched 
necessities, as sharers in a mutual re- 
sponsibility which no one rightly may 
evade. To do anything else is to shoulder 
off on others the burden of meeting life's 
harsh and unideal emergencies. It may 
even mean that we sit safely in the lee of 
the men who use massed force against 
massed force for righteousness' sake, not 
because they like to do it but because it 
has to be done, and that we credit what 
is really our ignoble individualism with 
being a fine service of ideals. A noted 
English pacifist said to the writer that in 
the present estate of the world he judged 
that England could have done nothing 
else in 1914 save to go to war, but that as 
for himself, he was a conscientious ob- 
jector and would have no part in it. He 
acknowledged a social necessity, in the 
meeting of which he refused any share. 
Nothing could be more immoral. For, 
however heartily we may hate the emer- 
gencies that the evil of the world presents, 
we must stay within the problem of 
43 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

international entanglements, as we stay 
within the economic system, to play our 
part as best we can in the redemption 
of both. As a great English Christian 
put it: *'The War presents to every crea- 
ture whose country is involved in it the 
one great moral issue of our times and for 
a man to say he can do nothing in it is to 
vote himself out of the moral world. " 

Even "conscientious objectors" — rather, 
they especially and most of all — should 
face this truth. As the Quakers lumi- 
nously have shown, a man may be 
unalterably averse to fighting and yet 
may take more than a negative attitude 
toward war. Forbidden by their scruples 
to engage in war, how often have they 
stopped the mouths of their traducers by 
their active, sacrificial contribution to 
the cause for which others fought! Since 
they came into existence, every war 
waged around a moral issue has felt the 
weight of their support. Sometimes, as 
in Whittier's day, the Quaker's blazing 
indignation against moral wrong has fed 
44 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

the flames of the conflict. Sometimes, as 
in England now, the most hazardous 
enterprises that the war could fiirnish, 
like sweeping the seas for mines, have 
specially attracted the Quaker volunteers. 
In many wars their money has gone 
where they could not and they have 
outbraved th(i l^rave in deeds of mercy on 
the hattlefleld. 1'hey shouldered what 
part they could of the common burden; 
they acknowledged their share in the 
social emergency; th(*y could not fight, 
but they revealed in ways as periKjus as 
battle their unspoiled conviction that 
some things are worth fighting for. One 
does not need to agree with such a Quak- 
er's program in ord(ir to honor his sj)irit. 
Today he pcjints the only way of self- 
respect for a ** conscientious objector.*' 
The first Vjusiness of any man whose 
scruples will not let him fight is to find 
a post of danger and sacrifice in the com- 
mon cause that will save him from the 
deadly sin of shirking. 

As for the Christian who believes that 
45 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

when force is ruthlessly employed for 
wrong, it may have to be met by force 
employed for right, the present war must 
come to him with a call for service clear 
and undeniable. He surely cannot thrust 
on others the meeting of the crisis, while 
he escapes. He must bear his part, and 
in those hours when he carries up to God 
the sad and tangled confusion of the 
world's affairs, and seeks in the divine 
light the clue of duty through the laby- 
rinth of conflicting rights and wrongs, he 
may plead America's cause in sincere and 
hearty prayer: 

O God, bless our Country! We la- 
ment before Thee the cruel necessity of 
war. But what could we do.? Our dead 
by hundreds lie beneath the sea; the 
liberties that our sires baptized with 
their blood and handed down to us in 
trust, so that they are not ours alone but 
all humanity's, are torn in shreds; and a 
foe is loose against us whom we have not 
chosen, whom we have not aggrieved, 
and who in his will to conquer counts 
solemn oaths to be but scraps of paper 
46 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

and the chivalry of the seas an empty 
name. We have grown weary, to the 
sickness of our souls, sitting comfortably 
here, while others pour their blood like 
water forth for those things which alone 
can make this earth a decent place for 
man to live upon. What could we do? 
With all the evils of our nation's life, 
that we acknowledge and confess with 
shame, we yet plead before Thee that 
we have not wanted war, that we 
hate no man, that we covet no nation's 
possessions, that we have nothing for 
ourselves to gain from war, unless it be 
a clear conscience and a better earth for 
all the nations to live and grow in. We 
plead before Thee that if patience and 
good will could have won the day, we 
gladly should have chosen them, and pa- 
tience long since would have had her per- 
fect work. And now we lay our hand 
upon our sword. Since we must draw it, 
O God, help us to play the man and to 
do our part in teaching ruthlessness once 
for all what it means to wake the sleep- 
ing lion of humanity's conscience. 



47 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

IV 

We have endeavored to do justice to 
the use of force as an agency in human Hfe. 
77,^ But the peril with most 

limitations Americans is not that they 

^ ^''^^ will undervalue force dur- 

ing these days of war; the peril is that they 
will be obsessed by it. In war the instru- 
ments with which men endeavor to achieve 
their ends are instruments of force ; and in 
the thought of our generation what guns 
and battleships and submarines and aero- 
planes and the massed strength of charg- 
ing men, armed to the teeth, can do is 
dominant. We Christians need chiefly 
to be reminded of what these things can- 
not do; we are challenged to an unre- 
mitting emphasis upon the limitations of 
force, and its futility for all the higher 
ends of human life. War, like all use of 
physical compulsion, is at its best a 
surgical operation. By surgery you may 
restrain an alien growth, but surgery 
jiever cures. The positive, constructive 

4a 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

forces of health must cure and without 
them surgery is a cruel failure. So war 
at its best can do one thing and one 
thing only. It can halt some external 
work of evil, it can blow away, as in the 
American Revolution, oppressive condi- 
tions that thwart free development. But 
that is all. Its work is all negative, elim- 
inative. The agencies of positive health 
in social life are not akin to war ; they are 
good will and friendship and cooperation. 
Only these can cure any social ill and 
without them the work of the knife is a 
bitter failure. 

Suppose that the dearest hopes of our 
military leaders were fulfilled and that 
Germany were conquered by force of 
arms until she must confess it and abide 
by such terms as we and our allies chose 
to impose, what after all would be ac- 
complished? We could compel Germany 
physically to vacate violated territory; 
we could compel Germany to pay indem- 
nity, we could cripple the piratical schemes 
of pan-Germanism — such things we could 
49 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

do by force, and leaving it there, would 
thrust vmder the ashes of Germany's 
failure embers of undying hatred that in 
a generation would flare up again in fire. 
We would cure nothing. War by itself 
never cures anything. Mankind is for- 
tunate if war even restrains the evil it 
was meant to halt and does not create 
new evils worse than those attacked, as 
surgery sometimes scatters the cancerous 
poison that it tries to cut away. But 
even when a war does the restraining 
work to which it sets itself, it can cure 
no radical social wrong or offer to human- 
ity a single solid hope. Only good will 
can do that. We Christians need to say 
this to ourselves until it makes the circuit 
of our blood and comes back to our 
hearts again. The knife of the surgeon 
is cutting in; can we supply the construc- 
tive forces of social health to make the 
operation worth while? 

We need to say this to ourselves 
emphatically because whatever may be 
the fine ideals with which a nation enters 
50 



THE prj:sent crisis 

war, as President Wilson phrased them 
for us in his noVjle message, hate thrives 
in war-time like germs in a congenial 
medium. We have heard much ahout the 
cult of hatred in Germany; we have 
cringed at Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate" 
against England. But such a spirit is 
not peculiarly indigenous in Germany. 
Here is Henri de Regnier's song of hate 
from France: 

"I swear to cherish in my heart this hate 
Till my last heart-throb wanes; 

So may the sacred venom of my blood 
Mingle and charge my veins! 

May there pass never from my darkened 
Ijrow 
The furrows hate has worn! 
May they plough deeper in my flesh, to 
mark 
The outrage I have borne! 

By towns in flames, by my fair fields laid 
waste, 

By hostages undone, 
By cries of murdered women and of babes. 

By each dead warrior son, . . . 



^ 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

I take my oath of hatred and of wrath 

Before God, and before 
The holy waters of the Marne and Aisne, 

Still ruddy with French gore; 

And fix my eyes upon immortal Rheims, 
Burning from nave to porch, 

Lest I forget, lest I forget who lit 
The sacrilegious torch!" 

* One quotes this not chiefly to condemn 
it, but to note how natural it is, how 
spontaneously it rises from the mood 
that war creates, how certainly we shall 
be tempted to it in America. Whatever 
conceivable good this war might possibly 
do will be undone by such a spirit. If 
that mood prevails, and in the settlement 
of the war is dominant, then the war is 
all sheer waste, a mad expenditure of 
blood and tears and treasure, with noth- 
ing to show for it save graves and poverty 
and broken hearts and bitter rancor and 
a world grown worse, not better. For our 
own sakes and for the world's sake, though 
we fight we must not hate. We are 
Christians. We know when we think of 
52 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

it that had we been born in Germany, 
there is not one chance in a million that 
we would be doing other than the Ger- 
mans do. We know that had we been 
the inheritors of the Prussian tradition, 
the pupils from early childhood of the 
Prussian instruction, and the instinctive 
patriots that all good men are, we should 
be thinking what the Germans think 
today. Underneath they are not differ- 
ent men and women from ourselves, and 
they can no more be conquered in the 
inner citadel of their hearts by force alone 
than could we. We never really sur- 
render to anything but good will. Neither 
will they. Force is evidently the neces- 
sary prelude to that capitulation. There 
is no hope for the world with an autocratic, 
military Germany triumphant. We must 
win the war. But we must keep our- 
selves unembittered ; we must fight all 
bitter policies in our government; our 
good will must be unwearying and strong. 
We must be as ready to forgive as is God. 
And in those secret hours when we carry 
53 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

the tragedy of this war before the throne 
of God we must pray for more than our 
country; we must pray for our enemies: 

O God, bless Germany! At war with 
her people, we hate them not at all, and 
underneath the cruel divisions that force 
on us this sorry business of mutual de- 
struction we acknowledge before Thee 
those underlying unities that yet will be 
there and will be beautiful when war is 
over. Our enemies, too, are sons of God 
and brothers for whose sake Christ died. 
We acknowledge before Thee our part in 
the world's iniquity that rolls this bur- 
den on Thy heart and crucifies the Son 
of God afresh. We dare not stand in 
Thy sight and accuse Germany as though 
she alone were guilty of our international 
disgrace. We all are guilty. We confess 
with shame that the present horror is the 
natural fruit of sins in which we all have 
shared. We beseech Thee against those 
things in Germany and in us that make 
war possible. And especially we lift up 
our prayer for every good impulse in 
every German heart, for all misgivings 
among Germany's people that cast doubt 
upon the policies of f rightfulness and ter- 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

ror, for all the forces of a forward-look- 
ing democracy within her, and for every 
German Christian on his knees who is 
asking Thee for the dawn of peace and 
brotherhood. Save to the great service 
of the world, we beseech Thee, the won- 
derful qualities of the people whom we 
fight; let them not perish from the earth, 
burned in retributory fire. We need their 
strength to be our admiration and our 
help, as it now is our despair. O God, 
bring us all. Thy wayward people, to 
such a penitence and shame at having 
made Thy world by sin so sad a place, 
that we may learn brotherhood with that 
same diligence which now we give to war. 

It is no counsel of perfection to urge 
such an attitude. This never can be an 
impossible ideal to reach, even in war, 
while we have before us the admirable 
words of Edith Cavell, as she went out to 
execution: "I see now that patriotism 
is not enough. I must die without hatred 
or bitterness toward anyone." 

Especially should those who go to the 
front with the army purge their spirits of 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

all hate. We are constantly reminded 
that war brutalizes men; but we often 
forget that that depends on the man. 
The reactions of soldiers to the influences 
of war are as diverse as the response of 
people everywhere to life's less strenuous 
appeals. Some are ruined by war and 
some are redeemed by it to a purity of 
devotion and a wealth of sacrificial spirit 
they have never known before. Some are 
besmirched by war and some are cleansed 
by it, consecrating their bodies to chastity 
for service's sake. The elders among us 
who saw the conflict between the states, 
say that some men went into the Civil 
War and came out beasts. But some 
came back from the sights of suffering 
and deeds of horror and sacrifices of sur- 
passing heroism more tender and beauti- 
ful of spirit and rich in sympathetic 
humanity than they had ever been before. 
A brave and radiant friend of the writer, 
suffering the tragic consequences of in- 
fantile paralysis, was addressed in sym- 
pathy by an acquaintance who said, 
56 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

''Affliction does so color the life. " ''Yes," 
was the swift answer, "and / propose to 
choose the color,'' That such an attitude 
is possible toward war by those who are 
in the thick of its abominations is plain 
enough from the testimony of these recent 
years. Donald Hankey is dead now but 
he has left an imperishable witness from 
the midst of the battlefield : "I have seen 
with the eyes of God. I have seen the 
naked souls of men, stripped of circum- 
stance. Rank and reputation, wealth and 
poverty, knowledge and ignorance, man- 
ners and uncouthness, these I saw not. 
I saw the naked souls of men. I saw who 
were slaves and who were free: who were 
beasts and who were men: who were 
contemptible and who honorable. I 
have seen with the eyes of God. I have 
seen the vanity of the temporal and the 
glory of the eternal. I have despised 
comfort and honored pain. I have under- 
stood the victory of the Cross. O Death, 
where is thy sting .^ Nunc dimittis, 
Domine.'' 

57 



THE CHALLENGE OF 



Christians are challenged by this war 
not only to a recognition of the limitations 
The case ^^ force and to a spirit 

against of unconquerable good 

militarism ^jjj^ ^^^ ^^ ^ ceaseless 

attack upon the whole system of unchris- 
tian international relationships of which 
war is a natural expression. There is one 
marked difference between the sudden 
crisis which calls upon a man to attack a 
ruffian in the street, and the crisis which 
issues in war. We have not specially 
prepared for the former. We have not 
taken it for granted, expected it, armed 
for it, and assiduously planned for years 
to meet it. But in international relation- 
ships we count war an integral part of our 
system. We assume it as an event to be 
expected, and the nations arm themselves 
against each other and train themselves 
to slay each other, reckless of expense, as 
though war and international relations 
were inseparable. We scheme with mu- 
58 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

tual distrust in secret diplomacy, make 
compacts and leagues to each other's 
hurt, and act in every way as though a 
condition of international suspicion, envy, 
and latent hostility were the normal state 
of the world. Of course war comes. We 
shall as easily get peace out of the present, 
dominant idea of international affairs 
as we shall get figs from thistles. Chris- 
tian people are challenged to a definite 
and unending assault upon this immoral 
and needless paganism. 

Some are still so wedded to the present 
idea of international relationships that 
they find even the worst issue of them, 
war, not only unobjectionable but posi- 
tively desirable. They still talk of the 
glory of war. The writer once heard a 
learned judge, justly famed for legal 
talent and literary genius, declare that 
a country needed a war about once in 
thirty years. As well call in the floods of 
the Mississippi because incidentally they 
leave more fertile soil; as well call in 
the San Francisco fire because it showed 
59 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

the pluck of a brave people and made the 
building of a greater city possible. There 
are better ways of accomplishing such 
results than by disasters. Fire and flood 
are not glorious; all the glory is in the 
spirit of mankind which is made of stuff 
too splendid not to show its mettle even 
in the worst calamities. And war is not 
glorious, though oftentimes in war men 
are. 

One who knows w^hat really is happen- 
ing on European battlefields today and 
calls war glorious is morally unsound. 
Says an eye-witness: "Last night, at an 
officers' mess there was great laughter at 
the story of one of our men who had 
spent his last cartridge in defending an 
attack. 'Hand me down your spade, 
Mike,' he said; and as six Germans came 
one by one round the end of a traverse, 
he split each man's skull open with a 
deadly blow." That is war. Says a 
Young Men's Christian Association secre- 
tary: "Many times these fingers have 
reached through the skulls of wounded 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

men and felt their throbbing brains." 
That is war. An oflScer's letter from the 
front reads: 

"An enemy mine exploded here a few 
days ago and buried our brigade. Many 
of the men were killed, but some were 
not much hurt; so we dug them out and 
used them over again." 

Sons of God and brothers of Jesus Christ 
— ''dug them out and used them over 
again"! That is war. Said a group of 
German prisoners, as they bared their 
gashed forearms, "We were dying with 
thirst, we had our choice of doing what 
some men do in such a case — drink the 
blood of an enemy, or else drink our own. 
We are Christians : so we cut our own arms 
to get drink." That is war. War is not 
the gay color, the rhythmic movement, 
the thrilling music of the military parade. 
War is not even killing gallantly as 
knights once did, matched evenly in 
armor and in steed and fighting by the 
rules of chivalry. War now is dropping 
bombs from aeroplanes and killing women 
61 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

and children in their beds; it is shooting, 
by telephonic orders, at an unseen place 
miles away and slaughtering invisible 
men; it is murdering innocent travelers 
on merchant ships with torpedoes from 
unknown submarines ; it is launching clouds 
of poisoned gas and slaying men with 
their own breath. War means lying days 
and nights wounded and alone in No- 
Man's Land; it means men with jaws gone, 
eyes gone, limbs gone, minds gone; it 
means countless bodies of boys tossed into 
the incinerators that follow in the train of 
every battle; it means prison camps 
vicious with the inevitable results of en- 
forced idleness ; it means untended wounds 
and gangrene and the long time it takes to 
die; it means mothers who look for letters 
they will never see and wives who wait 
for voices they will never hear and chil- 
dren who listen for footsteps that will 
never come. That is war — "Its heroisms 
are but the glancing sunlight on a sea of 
blood and tears" — and a man who calls 
it glorious is mad. And through all these 
62 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

physical horrors runs a horror more appal- 
Kng still, the persistent debauching and 
brutalizing of men's souls. One who uses 
his knowledge and his imagination to 
perceive in its abominations what war 
really is, while he might never dream 
of using Walt Whitman's language, 
finds it hard to be sorry that the lan- 
guage has been used: "Wars are hell- 
ish business — all wars. . . . Any hon- 
est man says so — ^hates war, fighting, 
blood-letting. I was in the midst of it 
all — saw war where war was worst — not 
on the battlefields, no — in the hospitals: 
there war is worst: there I mixed with it, 
and now I say God damn the wars — all 
wars : God damn every war : God damn 
'em ! God damn 'em ! ' ' 

The last stand of those who still cling 
to the old illusion that there is something 
glorious about war is on the claim that 
war awakens the heroic qualities in men. 
To such an indictment as we just have 
brought against war, a very plausible 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

counter is quite possible. Where is it 
that the ministers of Christ, so the re- 
tort might run, look for their finest illus- 
trations of loyalty and courage and sacri- 
fice? When most they wish to inspire 
that devotion to moral causes on which 
the welfare of the world depends, where 
instinctively do they look for allusions to 
grip the heart? To war. And what 
hymns do they sing? "Onward, Christian 
soldiers, marching as to war"; ''The Son 
of God goes forth to war"; "Soldiers of 
Christ arise, and gird your armor on." 
War so inglorious and horrible as you 
depict? Then why is it the foundation 
of some of the finest chapters in Scripture, 
some of the most inspiring hymns, and 
many of the most appealing passages in 
preaching? 

This question is worth asking and worth 
answering. The defendants of militarism 
often catch Christian ears with this ap- 
peal. Bernhardi's appalling book, stating 
the purpose of the German war -party, 
says that war is Christian because it en- 
H 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

courages obedience, devotion, and self- 
sacrifice. And he is right in saying that 
war uses these noble qualities in men. 
Today deeds of heroism are being per- 
formed upon the battlefields that, when 
the war is over, will be recalled and 
cherished as spiritual treasures for the 
race's memory. The Prussian ensign 
who, fatally wounded, gathered the flag 
he carried to his breast, that falling in 
death upon it he might hide it from the 
capture of the enemy, presents what a 
picture of devotion! Or the French 
commander, calling for a volunteer for a 
fatal mission, who saw his OAvn son step 
out, for an instant looked at him with 
blanched face, and then sent him forth 
never to return — ^where shall one seek 
for more absolute loyalty? Bernhardi is 
right in this: the record of war is full of 
deeds whose nobility the race never can 
forget. 

This fact, however, as Bernhardi and 
many a milder advocate of militaristic 
glory do not see, is the basis for the most 
65 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

scathing charge against war. Shall not 
a man of Christian insight say this in 
answer? O war, I hate you most of all 
because you lay your hands upon the 
finest qualities in human life, qualities 
that rightly used would make a heaven 
on earth, and you use them to make a 
hell on earth instead. You take our 
spirit of courage and devotion, and in- 
stead of letting it be a benediction in the 
world, you use it to burn cities and sack 
cathedrals and slay men. You take our 
loyalty that well used would redeem the 
world, and you harness it to a movement 
that inevitably means the rape of women, 
the murder of children, and the starvation 
of whole populations. You take our reli- 
gion, and to help your deadly work 
you rend our God in pieces and make of 
him a score of tribal deities to whom men 
pray, as old barbarians, before our Lord 
had come, prayed to their idols as the 
gods of war. You take our science, the 
fruit of our dedicated intelligence, and 
you make even of that an effective minis- 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

ter of hate, so that while Napoleon in his 
wide experience never saw a battle-line 
over fifteen miles long, we have battle- 
lines 500 miles long, and death falls from 
the sky and bursts from the earth and 
hurtles from unseen ambuscades twenty 
miles away. This is the deepest charge 
against you, that you take our noblest 
powers and prostitute them to destructive 
ends. 

How can Christian people fail to see 
that they are challenged to a tireless fight 
against the system of international rela- 
tionships that makes this gross abuse of 
noble powers a possibility? Men are 
glorious in war. After a charge a wounded 
American, who was fighting with the 
troops in France, exclaimed: ''We went 
over the parapet at five o'clock and I was 
not hit till nine. They were the greatest 
four hours of my life." Where was the 
glory there? In war? No, in the spirit 
of the man — and that spirit is no specialty 
of war. Captain Scott had it when he 
crossed the Antarctic continent; Judson 
67 



THE CHALLENGE OP 

had it when he invaded Burma for Christ; 
Garrison had it when he launched the 
campaign for aboUtion. It is the spirit of 
adventure, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and 
scorn of danger. The most enheartening 
revelation of the war is the clear evidence 
it gives of how widespread in ordinary 
people these elemental qualities of man- 
hood are. Clerks, ploughmen, bankers, 
day -laborers from the streets; lawyers, 
physicians, ministers from their profes- 
sions — what prodigies of heroism are they 
all performing! "Look at those millions 
of men," a recent writer cries, "every 
man with his back to his home and his 
face toward his flag, and meditate on the 
incredible, immeasurable, unimaginable 
power of patriotism!" But having a 
human nature to deal w^ith that has such 
powers of devotion, cooperation, and tire- 
less energy within it, this is the most 
colossal crime that the race can commit, 
to use these splendid qualities for slaugh- 
ter. What a world could be made here, if 
they were harnessed to a better cause! 
68 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

Is there anything impossible to a race with 
powers Hke these? 

There are many who seriously think 
that it is impossible to do away with war 
and the conditions that produce it. They 
do not call war glorious, but they do call 
it necessary. They have no faith that 
humanity can put its bayonets and can- 
non in the museums where they belong 
with racks and thumbscrews and the 
shackles of the slave. And one reason 
for this skepticism is that Christian 
people have presented as the cure for 
international hostilities panaceas so piti- 
ably inadequate that no one who knows 
the problem could believe in them. We 
never can cleanse the huge Augean stables 
of our world-wide armaments and wars by 
gathering a band of people who will per- 
suade some other people never, under any 
circumstances, in the face of atrocities 
however great, to fight. The task before 
us is too gigantic to be handled by such 
means. Neither can we greatly help the 
situation by fervid campaigns for unpre- 
69 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

paredness, urging individual nations to 
disarm. Such negative movements for 
disarmament are bankrupt. Their failure 
is not due to any untruth in their main 
contention that to be prepared for war is 
to invite war. The old illusion that a 
great military establishment is an insur- 
ance against war has been finally dis- 
sipated, let us hope, by the present cata- 
clysm. Large armaments are a certain 
road to war, and militarism, posing as 
the angel of peace, is the most feckless 
and muddle-headed sham in history. 

The nations, however, even if they 
know for certain that armaments mean 
war, will not individually disarm. In the 
early days of our Western frontiers men 
carried six-shooters and were quick on 
the trigger, not because they were bad 
men. They were the same men they had 
been before, unarmed and peaceable in 
Eastern towns. But they were afraid. 
In the wild, anarchic life of the frontier 
there was no social order to guarantee a 
peaceful man his life and liberty. No 
70 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

community was organized that repre- 
sented the force of all at the disposal of 
all for the good of all. How useless to 
argue with individual men in such a 
situation, that carrying guns encouraged 
fighting and that therefore each man 
should throw his gun away! They may 
not doubt the abstract proposition, but 
they keep their guns. They are afraid. 
Only one measure ever made them dis- 
arm. The communal life was organized 
and the forceful protection of life and 
liberty was delegated to a social order 
that policed the towns. Fear was re- 
moved, and the arms which once seemed 
indispensable became a needless burden, 
an anachronism. 

No other hopeful road lies open before 
the nations. We keep armed because we 
are afraid. Perhaps that fear is our dis- 
grace, our moral failure to trust the spirit- 
ual powers of friendship and good will; 
but when we so begin to think and are 
almost ready to repent of dreadnoughts 
and regiments, Austria ^rikes Serbia, 
71 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

Germany devastates Belgium, and all 
the ancient fears come back again. There 
is only one road out. We must have a 
a federation of the world. No other solu- 
tion is great enough to deal with our 
critical need. The nations today are 
living on the wild, anarchic frontiers of 
history, carrying their guns in mutual 
fear, because there is no league of nations 
to police the w^orld. The forces of good 
will and brotherhood that are latent in 
mankind have no fair opportunity to do 
their saving work. They are stifled by 
the apparent necessity of armed distrust. 
No urgent appeals to the nations one by 
one to lay aside their armaments will 
meet with favorable response. No nega- 
tive proposal of any kind can solve the 
problem of our divided world. The only 
solution of international discord is inter- 
nationalism. Wherever force is needed, 
the force of all must be put at the disposal 
of all for the good of all. 

Does this federation of the nations seem 
an impossible ideal .^ But already a con- 
72 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

Crete proposition that has for its vouchers 
the leading statesmen of the world is 
framed and offered for our support. To 
the principles of the ''League to Enforce 
Peace" President Wilson has given his 
assent; and ex-President Taft, Premier 
Lloyd George, ex-Premier Asquith, Mr. 
Balfour, Lord Grey, Viscount Bryce, and 
Premier Briand have promised their sup- 
port.^ 

Such a massing of international influ- 
ence around an endeavor after world- 
wide cooperation for the good of mankind 
has never been known before. No one 
supposes that the task is a light one. Was 
it easy even to form a federation of our 
American states? No one supposes that 
he can foresee the details of the plan, the 
steps which one by one across years and 

^ Lloyd George said In a Guildhall speech: "The peace and 
security for peace will be that the nations will band them- 
selves together to punish the first peace breaker who comes 
out." Said President Wilson in an address to the Senate: 
"In every discussion of the peace that must end this war, it 
is taken for granted that that peace must be followed by 
some definite concert of power, which will make it virtually 
impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm 
us again. Every lover of mankind, every sane and thought- 
ful man, must take that for granted." 

73 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

centuries will lead to the goal. But this 
federation of the world not only can be 
achieved; it must be. All the forces of 
man's economic and moral life demand 
that it be done. Better far to live in 
isolation, each nation behind its Chinese 
wall, than to come out into our new world- 
wide intimacies and then not learn the 
secret of mankind's larger unity that alone 
can bring peace instead of war. And to 
this unwearying conflict against our pres- 
ent international paganism in favor of 
this federation of the world, the Christian 
people supremely are challenged. 

In one essential part of this campaign, 
the innermost and preeminently essential 
part of it, the Christian people have 
unique responsibilities. Behind and 
around all forms of organization which 
our statesmen may devise for internation- 
al cooperation, there must be developed 
in all the people the international mind. 
Once men of clannish tradition found it 
hard to think in tribal terms; then men 
of tribal mold strained their minds to 
74 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

national dimensions; and now we with 
our national sectarianisms find it difficult 
to think ourselves citizens of the world. 
No scheme of universal policy that state- 
craft can devise will work until the people 
are internationalists in their thoughts. 
And Christianity is challenged by its 
Master to give to men that horizon to 
their loyalties, that Fatherland for their 
sacrifice. If this seems a platitude, it is 
one of those platitudes whose most ob- 
vious applications have not yet been even 
dimly seen by multitudes of Christians. 
In 1860 a man in Maryland said, "I am 
firstly a citizen of Hartford County; 
secondly a citizen of Maryland; thirdly a 
citizen of the United States." How 
amazingly provincial such words sound a 
generation after! One wonders if this 
man was a member of a Christian church, 
a believer in the Christian creed, a pray-er 
to the Christian God. And then he sees 
how many churchmen still are like him — 
no disciples of Jesus in any deep, intelli- 
gent sense. For the Christian's citizen- 
75 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

ship must always begin at the other end 
from Hartford County; he is firstly a 
citizen of the Kingdom of God on earth, 
a patriot for mankind. A Christianity 
that is not international has never known 
its Master. 

No fine loyalties in human life, however 
sacred and essential they may be, are 
ever ruined, they are glorified by being 
subjugated to a larger spiritual unity. 
Jesus did not hurt the family when he said 
a man should hate his father and mother, 
his wife and children, if they stood 
athwart the Kingdom's triumph in the 
world; he made the family. Family life 
in Christendom has grown beautiful just 
because it has been subjugated to a 
spiritual idea and made a moral, not 
simply a natural relationship. National- 
ism will not be hurt by being overpassed 
in international concord and cooperation. 
Rather, this alone can ever make national- 
ism great, can cleanse it from its ignoble 
strifes and mean ambitions, and can wash 
patriotism pure from hatred and malig- 
76 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

nity. As things stand now, patriotism is 
half curse, half blessing. It runs to 
chauvinism and sinister designs on other's 
goods as readily as it does to noble sacri- 
fice. It issues in slaughter as easily as it 
does in service. Only one thing can save 
nationalism from its perversions and that 
is internationalism. Patriotism rteeds to 
be mastered by a greater unity before it 
ever can be really great itself. If it is to 
mean unqualified blessing to the earth — 
a generous rivalry in service and not a 
malign consecration of selfishness under 
a holy name — ^patriotism must surrender 
its primacy to a world-wide loyalty, 
wrought into the habitual thinking of 
the people and expressed in agencies 
of international cooperation and good- 
will. 

To work this inward transfiguration of 
man's thinking, which alone can give 
effectiveness to the outward devices of 
our statesmen, is the task of religion. 
Nothing but religion is adequate to the 
task. The words of Dr. Charles E. Jeffer- 
77 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

son ought to be nailed to the doorposts 
of every Christian's memory: ^ 

"Science cannot kill war, for science 
has not the new heart, and whets the 
sword to a sharper edge. Commerce can- 
not kill war, for commerce lacks the new 
heart, and lifts the hunger of covetous- 
ness to a higher pitch. Progress cannot 
kill war, for progress has no heart at all, 
and progress in wrong directions leads us 
into bottomless quagmires in which we 
are swallowed up. Law cannot kill war, 
for law is nothing but a willow withe tied 
round the arms of humanity, and human 
nature when aroused snaps all the withes 
asunder and carries off the gates of Gaza. 
Education cannot end war, and if by 
education you mean the sharpening of the 
intellect, the drawing out of the powers of 
the mind, the mastering of formulas and 
laws and dates and facts, education may 
only fit men to become tenfold more 
masterful in the awful art of slaughter. 
Who will end war? The world has had 

i"What the War is Teaching," pp. 198-199. 
78 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

three historic scourges : famine, pestilence 
and war. Each one numbers its victims 
by the tens of miUions. Commerce killed 
famine. By her railroads and steamships 
she killed it. It lies like a dead snake by 
the side of the road along which humanity 
has marched up to the present day. 
Science killed pestilence. The Black 
Plague, the Bubonic Plague, Cholera, 
Smallpox, Yellow Fever — all have re- 
ceived their deathblow. Science did the 
work. These foes of mankind lie bleeding 
and half dead by the side of the road along 
which the world presses on to a higher 
day. Who will kill war? Not Commerce 
and not Science, nor both of them to- 
gether. Only Religion can kill war, for 
religion alone creates the new heart. 
Without religion we are without hope in 
this world. Without God we are lost. " 



79 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

VI 

If religion has such a part to play in 
the program of internationalism, we, as 
The challenge Christians, are challenged 
^^ ^^^ to a searching examina- 

tion of our faith and 
works, and to a fresh devotion to our 
cause. One of the wisest and most pic- 
turesque explications of the present crisis 
is attributed to Bergson, the French phi- 
losopher. He says, in effect, that the chief 
work of science has been to enlarge man's 
body. Telescopes and microscopes have 
increased the power of our eyes; tele- 
phones have stretched our hearing to 
some three thousand miles; telegraphs 
have made our voices sound around the 
earth; locomotives and steamship lines, 
better than seven-league boots of ancient 
fable, have multiplied the speed and pow- 
er of our feet; and French big guns have 
elongated the blows of our fists from two 
feet to twenty-five miles. Man never 
had such a body since the world began. 
80 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

The age of the giants was nothing com- 
pared with this. But man's soul — there 
the failure Hes. We have not grown spir- 
its great enough to handle our greatened 
bodies. The splendid new powers which 
science furnishes are still in the hands of 
the old sins — greed, selfish ambition, 
cruelty. The innermost necessity of man- 
kind is a spiritual life adequate to handle 
our new acquisitions. Some things we 
can do without, but one thing, in this 
war, has grown obviously indispensable. 
We must have a new access of moral vi- 
sion and power or we are utterly undone. 
As a thoughtful Christian stands before 
this challenge he must repent, for himself 
and for the churches, the lamentable in- 
adequacy of our organized religion to 
meet the crucial need. Were it not for 
such institutions as the Young Men's 
and the Young Women's Christian Asso- 
ciations, and the Federal Council of the 
Churches of Christ, we should have to 
cover our faces in confusion. This war 
will fail of one of its most beneficent 
81 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

results if it does not drive the sense of 
shame into the Christian churches with 
a poignancy that no excuses can paUiate. 
In the presence of a gigantic task, calUng 
for a federated Church, we stand a spHt, 
dissevered flock of churches. In the pres- 
ence of abysmal need, demanding a great 
religion of comprehensive faith and de- 
voted social spirit, we stand — how often! 
— ^tithing "mint and anise and cummin," 
and neglecting "the weightier matters of 
the law." We are challenged by this war 
to a renovation of our popular Christian- 
ity, to a deep and unrelenting detestation 
of the little bigotries, the needless divi- 
sions, the petty obscurantisms that so 
deeply curse our churches, to a new expe- 
rience and a more intelligent expression of 
vital fellowship with God. Unless we can 
answer that challenge, there is small use 
in our trying to answer any other. We 
must have a great religion to meet a great 
need. 

The saddest aspect of Christian history 
is the misrepresentation of Christ and the 
82 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

spoiling of his influence, not by irreligious 
men but by the ofl&cial exponents of reli- 
gion. The belittling of religion by its 
devotees is the most tragic narrative of 
Christendom. The unhappy story began 
with the Master's earthly ministry. As 
he emerged among a people where the 
minute disputes of rabbis w^ere so large 
a part of piety, how great in contrast was 
religion as it appeared to him! It meant 
to him an inward fellowship with God so 
close that to tell where he left off and God 
began is like discerning the air's fragrance 
from the sunlight on a radiant day. It 
meant to him a thought of God that sent 
him out to the help of men with a love 
no sin could turn aside and no ingratitude 
could quench, and with a hope that shone 
for him on desperate days like a beacon 
from below the line of the horizon, ad- 
vertising from afar that the haven was at 
hand. And after all these centuries, with 
what an ample sweep do the truths move 
that his religion meant to him! The 
Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of 
83 



THE CHALLENGE OP 

man, the friendship of the Spirit, the 
inexorableness of moral law, the suprem- 
acy of the Cross, the campaign for the 
Kingdom, the life eternal — what weight 
and range must the words have that try 
to tell what his faith meant to him ! 

And coming so to men, with his great 
religion, what opposition did the Master 
meet that most perplexed and discon- 
certed him? He faced bad men like the 
Prodigal, but with a love and hopefulness 
that never failed and never were dis- 
mayed. He found selfish men, like 
Zacchseus, but he refused to let their 
meanness blind his eyes to their possibili- 
ties. But another type of men he met, 
that he could not understand and against 
whose obdurate life his spirit spent itself 
in vain. These were the religious men 
who discussed whether it was the will of 
God that men eat eggs which had been 
laid on the Sabbath Day; and one school 
said it was and another said it wasn't. 
These were the religious men who by a 
ritual word escaped their moral obliga- 
84 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

tions to their parents or stood in the 
temple thanking God that they had fasted 
twice a week. Only one type of man, our 
Master, with all the wide ranges of his 
pity and compassion, could not under- 
stand — the religious man who belittled 
religion into technicalities and reduced 
the service of the living God from ethics 
to etiquette. How the Master's spirit 
chafed against these! "Ye blind guides," 
he said, and there was agony in the cry, 
"that strain out the gnat and swallow 
the camel!" 

A thoughtful Christian cannot fail to 
see that when our Lord comes now to us, 
in the crisis of this terrific war, he finds 
us too, with our petty emphasis on the 
technicalities of sectarian religion, poorly 
prepared to understand the spiritual 
greatness of his message, unready to 
interpret it to a world, whose footsteps, 
lacking it, have manifestly taken hold on 
ruin. Many a man among us, reared in 
some special sect, as he now recalls the 
preaching that he has heard remem- 
85 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

bers how much of it concerned the minu- 
tiae of the sect. At times he almost was 
constrained to think that only where 
he stood was holy ground, and he 
alone with his few fellow-devotees elect 
of God. So Ruskin tells us that he gave 
up his evangelical faith because a sermon 
that he heard at Turin was the last 
straw: "A little squeaking idiot," Rus- 
kin writes, "was preaching to an audience 
of seventeen old women and three louts 
that they were the only children of God in 
Turin; and that all the people outside the 
chapel and that all the people in the world 
out of sight of Monte Viso, would be 
damned." 

But as our Christian grew he saw how 
certainly religion was greater than his 
sect. The very hymnals unconsciously 
advertised the fact. For even in his little 
church, he sang with a Methodist, "Jesus, 
Lover of my soul," and with an Episco- 
palian, "Rock of ages, cleft for me," 
and with a Congregationalist, "I love 
Thy Kingdom, Lord, " and with a Presby- 
86 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

terian, *' Jesus and shall it ever be, a 
mortal man ashamed of Thee, " and with a 
Unitarian, "In the cross of Christ I 
glory," and with a Roman Catholic, 
"Lead, Kindly Light," and with a Bap- 
tist, "Blest be the tie that binds our 
hearts in Christian love." 

Surely religion was greater than his 
sect. Still when he thought of folks, not 
Christians, who never had heard of Christ, 
unnumbered millions far and wide around 
the world, the majority of the children of 
God, he grouped them under one word — 
"heathen." Then some things that the 
heathen did began to disturb his soft 
complacency. He found that some hea- 
then in India pray like this : 
"O Lord 

From the unreal lead me to the real. 
From darkness lead me to light. 
From death lead me to immortality." 

He found that some heathen In China 
pray like this: 

''Spirits and men rejoice together, praising 
God the Lord. What limit, what measure 
87 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

can there be, while we celebrate his great 
name? Forever he setteth fast the high 
heavens and shapeth the solid earth. His 
government is everlasting. His poor 
servant, I bow my head and lay it in the 
dust bathed in his grace and glory." 

If our Christian was wise, he did not 
from this conclude that all religions are 
equally true and good. A man may not 
here abdicate the first work of intellect, 
which is discrimination. Buddhism, Con- 
fucianism, and Christianity represent 
quite distinct philosophies of the spiritual 
life and can no more be equally true than 
can contrasting hypotheses in science. But 
with the outward sweep of his horizons he 
did begin to see how much greater a thing 
religion is than he had used to think, how 
deep its fountains lie in human souls, 
how unescapable is the spirit's thirst, like 
the homing instinct of the bird, for the 
God from whom it comes. He did begin 
to see that as love is in human life, so is 
religion ; that in forms low or high all men 
know them both; that low they curse 
88 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

men, and high, bless them with ineffable 
benediction. And in hours of vision when 
he saw it so, and heard the deep in man 
calling out for the deep in the Eternal, 
it seemed to him that he was coming close 
to the heart of Christ, close to the springs 
of his exhaustless passion to reveal the 
living God, without whom man cannot be 
really man. 

When one in such a spirit comes to the 
religious world today to work in it and 
through it, a jargon pitched in an alien 
key astonishes his ears. "You cannot sit 
at my communion table," one sect is 
saying; "Nor you at mine," another 
cries. "Your rituals are inexact, your 
ordinances are incorrectly understood." 
He sees strange sights — in 1890, 137 
different kinds of Christians in the United 
States, now 165. And if he listens from 
within, what bickering over details of 
polity, what petty pressing of legalistic 
texts, what endless splits twixt Tweedle- 
dee and Tweedledum — as though our 
Lord would not once more, if he were 
89 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

here, wither with blistering scorn such 
rabbinical belittling of the faith! Are 
these times that seem to call for such 
minute finesse? As one thinks of the 
world today, shaken in an earthquake 
that brings clattering down about our 
ears the dearest dreams our hearts have 
cherished, it does seem that religion 
should grow great to meet her crisis and 
opportunity, and casting aside the little- 
ness that in calmer days might find ex- 
cuse, ought to speak great words about 
God and the Kingdom, lest men's hearts 
turn to water in them and their strength 
be gone. This is the challenge of the 
present crisis to the Christians. The 
New Testament does not say that "Every 
knee shall bow and every tongue confess" 
that our church or our theology alone is 
true. The New Testament says that 
"Every knee shall bow and every tongue 
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." If 
we were large enough so to interpret him 
that men could see him as he is, unper- 
verted by our littleness, they soon 
90 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

would understand his claim to spiritual 
mastery. ''Our Father, who art in 
heaven, hallowed be thy name"; ''Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy 
heart and with all thy soul and with all 
thy strength and with all thy mind, and 
thy neighbor as thyself"; "By this shall 
all men know that ye are my disciples, 
if ye have love one for another"; "Thy 
Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth 
as it is in heaven" — is there anything 
local or provincial about words like those? 
Are they not as broad, as deep, as high 
as human need? And are not his disciples 
challenged to labor unceasingly for such 
a generous freedom of opinion on details, 
such a dominant emphasis on the central 
message of the Gospel, and such a fra- 
ternal federation of the churches for 
united work, as will make the need of the 
world the opportunity of Christ to come 
to his own? 

The practical need of this is made vivid 
in an unexampled way by the world's 
disaster. The nations are forever striving 
91 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

to avoid war when it is too late; they try 
to dam the stream after the spring 
freshet has begun. The only way to 
guard against war, so far as war arises 
from the embittered passions of the people, 
is by constructive campaigns of good 
will, launched long before the first rum- 
bling of a coming conflict. What now is 
our surest reliance in America against any 
unresolvable misunderstanding with 
Chma? It lies m the $50,000,000 which 
out of sheer good will our government 
returned to China when the Boxer in- 
demnity was paid. Hundreds of Chinese 
students supported by the interest of 
that fund are studying in America now, 
and in every intelligent Chinese mind 
there is a settled predisposition to trust 
America. 

We have just adopted a gigantic budget 
of $7,000,000,000 for the purposes of war. 
How magnificent — and how pathetic! 
Consider what a very little of that prodi- 
gious sum would do if, instead of being 
voted after war begins, it were appropri- 
92 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

ated before war was thought of for such 
international service as the Boxer Indem- 
nity Fund is furnishing. Utopian? On 
the contrary the most sane and eco- 
nomical statesmanship ! To spend billions 
for the means of slaughter when millions 
previously expended in good will for serv- 
ice would often make the means of 
slaughter needless, is folly so supreme as 
almost to justify the saying that soldiers 
often fight, not for their country but for 
some blockhead of a diplomat^ The cost 
of that folly we loyally will pay, and our 
children after us will be paying it for 
generations; but, as Christians, we may 
not be silent about the folly itself nor 
cease our unwearying antagonism to it. 
So few times in history has any nation 
done what America did for China, and so 
overwhelming is the response to such 
simple friendliness that the nations can- 
not permanently be blind to the good 
sense, as well as the ethical nobility, of 
such a course. The extreme pacifists 
insist that there is no situation which 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

kindness cannot handle. They are wrong 
if they mean that kindness can begin at 
any time, appealing to the Prussians, 
for example, after the assault on Belgium 
has been started. But they are right if 
they mean that kindness begun soon 
enough and practiced long enough in the 
end will prove omnipotent. We yet shall 
learn that the best armament of any 
people is the friendship of the world, won 
by constructive good will. 

The application of this truth to the 
churches' missionary program is manifest. 
The cause of missions has too often been 
presented in its significance for individuals 
alone; it has been pictured only as the 
snatching of souls one by one from ruin. 
But this crisis in the world's life challenges 
us to balance our view of missions with a 
more social concept of their meaning. 
The missionary enterprise is the Christian 
campaign for international good will. We 
must see that it is so and must handle it 
as though it were so. What the nations, 
through their governments, will slowly 
94 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

learn to do, loath to leave old precedents, 
bound by the sectarian narrowness of 
national loyalties, Christians must do 
now, and do with a lavish generosity that 
they have not practiced hitherto. 

We are told that some day we shall 
have war with Mexico. How much our 
own fault it will be if such a lamentable 
conflict comes ! What Mexico needs is an 
invasion of school teachers and social 
workers and Christian preachers, who 
have caught the idea of missions in their 
international relationships; and if such 
an invasion is not forthcoming, a military 
invasion may indeed be necessary. One 
suspects in many a case like this that we 
have our choice. We are continually re- 
minded of clashing interests that some 
day will embroil us with Japan. Even the 
present war could hardly be a more 
grievous catastrophe than that. And 
short of some league of nations which 
may offer means of mediation and settle- 
ment not today existent the surest hope 
of avoiding conflict, of forestalling war by 
95 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

friendship, is an energetic campaign of 
good will now. If the Christians of 
America do not want war with Japan, 
they need not have it. Japan is not mad 
enough to want war with America. Only 
we must begin now, under the leadership 
of Christian missionaries and statesmen 
like Dr. John R. Mott and Dr. Sidney 
Gulick, a determined movement within 
our country against our needlessly insult- 
ing legislation, when Orientals are con- 
cerned, and we must organize such ex- 
pressions of good will through our mis- 
sionary agencies that, if possible, we may 
create a predisposition in the Japanese 
people to believe the best of us and not 
the worst. The missionary enterprise at 
its very heart is the impulse to share our 
finest, and if the finest in America and the 
finest in Japan were thoroughly known to 
each other, the chances of collision would 
be minimized to vanishing. Such a min- 
istry of mutual interpretation and recon- 
ciliation is committed to the churches. 
The present war is an appalling commen- 
96 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

tary upon our failure to fulfil or even to 
acknowledge our obligations. We have 
seen our duty in too little terms; we have 
but dimly understood what the Master 
wanted of us. We are challenged to 
understand it now; the call is written in 
lines of fire on the map of the world; and 
we shall be renegade, indeed, if we do not 
now accept before it is too late the oppor- 
tunity for international service which this 
war reveals. 

Such is the challenge of the present 
crisis. We have talked of it as though its 
appeal were directed to the nations and 
the churches. But we shall not deal fairly 
with the world's appalling need if we fail 
as individuals to hear the call it sounds 
for each of us. A writer in the Atlantic, 
to whom Good Friday, 1917, with its 
sacred memories and its imminent en- 
trance of America into the war, came 
with overwhelming solemnity, has issued 
a call that no one can honorably deny: 
*'The greatness of the whole nation is so 
inextricably bound up with its individuals 



THE CHALLENGE OF 

that I beg again each one of you now to 
say to himself or herself, *This means me. 
It means me and my life, my best self, my 
highest ideals, if the magnificent oppor- 
tunities of the times are to be realized.'" 
There may have been other days when 
selfishness could find excuse in the smooth 
ease of the nation's prosperity, but the 
last shred of such excuse has been torn 
now from every selfish undedicated life. 
An American visitor at the French front 
was allowed a three hours' conference 
with Marshal Joffre. He has said, in the 
writer's presence, that the most im- 
pressive incident of the conversation 
came when the Marshal drew from an 
inner pocket a well-worn letter, written 
by a French mother to her son in Canada, 
and, with unsteady voice, read this: 

"My dear boy: 

"You will be grieved to learn that your 
two brothers have been killed. Their 
country needed them and they gave 
everything they had to save her. Your 
country needs you, and while I am not 
98/ 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 

going to suggest that you return to fight 
for France, if you do not return at once, 
never come." 

Multitudes are living in that spirit today. 
He must have a callous soul who can 
pass through times like these and not 
hear a voice, whose call a man must an- 
swer, or else lose his soul. Your country 
needs you. The Kingdom of God on 
earth needs you. The Cause of Christ 
is hard bestead and righteousness is hav- 
ing a heavy battle in the earth — they 
need you. 



JUL -1 13^ 



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